Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited The Odyssey opens Friday and the picture goes big, or bigger than big, in every particular. Three hours long, it’s Nolan’s first picture shot entirely on the large-gauge, giant screen IMAX format. The first film adaptations of Homer’s homecoming story, chronicling hero Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War, were made well over one hundred years ago. The scale and ambition of Nolan’s vision — both narrative and technical — is arguably unprecedented, however. 

As it happens, however, the movie is somewhat more intimate and character-driven than cinema spectacle mavens might expect. If you know Nolan’s work well you understand that he’s as animated by relationships as he is by gigantic imagery, but the immediacy of this movie’s concern with Matt Damon’s Odysseus’s fraught interactions with his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is often startling. The trio provide stellar performances, as does Robert Pattinson, as a villain who’s always looking offstage for a prop person to bring him a mustache to twirl. 

As you’ve probably heard, Nolan’s dialogue is in contemporary American English. Some, um, critics, have complained that this takes the viewer out of “period,” as if any of us really have a sense of what it was like to live without indoor plumbing. My point is, any attempt at an approximation of period dialogue would be a false flex anyway. Refer anybody complaining about this point to Derek Jarman’s superb 1976 Sebastian, spoken entirely in Latin. They will probably not like it or get it. As we’ll be noting below, different directors have different “solutions” to the dialogue authenticity issue. All require a certain suspension of disbelief. A stubborn refusal to meet Nolan’s solution at least half way strikes me as bad faith. In any event, this is a very different approach to Homer, something almost entirely new. 

But what were the sword and sandal, Homer-infused, and epic films that paved the way for Nolan’s grand Odyssey? From 1954’s Ulysses to the modern summer blockbuster Troy, here are the films you should visit on your own cinematic odyssey…

• While Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, has undeniable action-movie credentials (you may remember his multi-film portrayal of an always-on-the-run spy named Jason Bourne), he’s not Kirk Douglas. And it was the square-jawed, broad-chested Douglas who imprinted a certain image of ancient derring-do on filmgoers seventy years back, in the simply-titled Ulysses, a 1954 Italian-American co-production whose original director was to be the German G.W. Pabst, best known for his direction of Louise Brooks in the late-1920s classic Pandora’s Box. Pabst was replaced by Italian Mario Camerini, and the future horror maestro Mario Bava concocted some of the movie’s special effects. The picture is not nearly as camp as one might infer; instead, clumsy narrative construction notwithstanding, it’s visually ravishing fun, with costars Anthony Quinn and Silvana Mangano contributing to the credibility of the drama. 

  STREAM ULYSSES (1954)

• Only one year later, American director Robert Wise cast Rosanna Podesta, who plays Nausicaa in the Camerini film, in the title role of Helen Of Troy, the story of the woman without whom Ulysses would have had no ten-or-so-year war from which to travel home. While director Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still is today acknowledged as a stone classic, the picture was only a moderate success on its release, so Wise was still in journeyman gear when he took on this picture. The storyline is stolid but Wise’s visual acuity is always on point in this CinemaScope super production. And the movie also features future dominant French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot in a small role as one of Helen’s confidantes. 

  Stream HELEN OF TROY (1956)

• In the meantime Kirk Douglas just kept rolling along in pictures like Richard Fliescher’s brisk, exciting 1958 The Vikings (in which Ernest Borgnine gets thrown into a pit full of starving wolves, gnarly) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Spartacus, movies that dealt in completely different mythologies and histories but still seemed like a continuance of an epic at least Homeric in scope. Kubrick and Wise’s film began a tradition for such period pictures, depicting Roman or Greek aristocrats speaking in British or at least mid-Atlantic accents, while the strivers of the time talked like ordinary Americans, or Kirk Douglas, depending. (This tendency even persisted in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, with Harvey Keitel’s Judas of Brooklyn and David Bowie’s veddy British Pontius Pilate.) 

  Stream Spartacus (1960)

• The great stop-motion animation artist Ray Harryhausen didn’t consider Greek mythology proper until his final film, 1981’s Clash of the Titans (which itself was remade, as a clumsy, noisy tumult, in 2010), in which Lawrence Olivier’s Zeus and Claire Bloom’s Hera toy with mortals led by Harry Hamlin’s Perseus. The film does not show Harryhausen at the height of his powers, and the popularity of the Star Wars pictures at this time compelled the producers to feature an R2-D2-like (sorta) golden mechanical owl named Bubo to the proceedings. Much more fun is the Greek-myth-derived 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, which showcases Harryhausen at 200 proof. The giant metal statue Talos (based on the design of the actual Colossus of Rhodes) Jason and his men have to topple, the flying harpies that torment their ears, the army of skeletons they have to somehow vanquish; all these visions, like Willis O’Brien’s King Kong and opposing dinosaurs from decades before, still have the power to entrance and impress. No CGI can touch it. 

  Stream JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)

• The nearly three-hour made for television Odyssey of 1997 is coproduced by the Hallmark Channel, but the other entity behind it is Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, so take heart…maybe? Creature effects from Jim Henson’s shop are inventive, the cast is mostly dynamite — Great Scacchi as Penelope, actual Greek actor Irene Papas as Anticlea, Christopher Lee as Tiresias, Armand Assante as Odysseus (I said MOSTLY dynamite) — and Andrei Konchalesky has been known to direct well. But the result is ultimately kind of wearing. 

  Stream The ODYSSEY (1997) on YOUTUBE

• In 2000, those rascally Coen brother saw fit to transpose Homer into a 1930s escape-from-a-chain gang movie. Oh Brother, Where Art Though? George Clooney is the Odysseus figure, breaking out of prison to seek buried treasure and encountering with his buddies a Cyclops played by John Goodman and some sexy sirens whose voices are dubbed by Emmylou Harris, Alison Kraus, and Gillian Welch. Did I mention the movie is also a musical?

  Stream o Brother, Where art tho? (2004)

• And if, before you check out Nolan’s movie, you’d like to explore first causes, there’s 2004’s Troy, starring Brad Pitt (who we all know from, among other things, co-starring with Matt Damon and George Clooney in the Ocean’s films) in the role of Achilles, the warrior with the one fatal flaw, and Sean Bean as Odysseus. The master technician Wolfgang Petersen directed, and his preferred cut is actually about 15 minutes longer than the Nolan epic and thirty longer than the theatrical take. It’s such a spectacle you might not notice the big liberties it takes with Homer, and there are a lot. Do you really care that much? As is the case with Nolan’s Odyssey, it’s a movie, people! 

  Stream TROY (2004)

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is currently in theaters only.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.